No. of Recommendations: 3
As you point out sometimes in other contexts, it's about incentives. By integrating China into the global economy, we vastly disincentivize them from getting into a "hot" military conflict. Did we? The CCP had its hands full getting the country on its feet.
The entire time since they were granted Most Favored Nation status they've been building muscle and learning how to be a global power. Now here we are.
China
-Is as close to an early 20th century robber baron - in nation-state form - that one could get
-Routinely bullies, intimidates and uses its economic power to exert influence
-Routinely lies and steals intellectual property from others
-Routinely fuels mass death in the United States via fentanyl
-Routinely abuses human rights en masse at home and abroad to feed their economic machine
-Routinely engages in large scale espionage and cyber attacks against the United States
-And increasingly...they're trailing their coats in ways meant to intimidate their neighbors.
They can accomplish an awful lot without firing a shot.
They're not good guys. Far, far from it.
But not China, who has refrained from letting things get to the point of major shooting wars, and indeed has kept their client North Korea bottled up as well.You're aware that China
doesn't need to fight when it has proxies to do it for them, right?
In the Red Sea:
https://ceias.eu/china-in-the-red-sea/Funny how no Chinese ships are ever troubled while sailing there, and everyone else is. Who benefits in that scenario? Especially when NATO navies are expending loads of expensive weapons on the daily?
Russia:
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/the-subtle-...The Chinese are funding Putin's war and keeping his economy afloat. Why? Because it's bleeding the West financially. Who wins in that scenario?
You would need a massive reallocation of U.S. capital and labor into a vast amount of very low-value, low-paying, repetitive, dangerous, and frankly lousy jobs in order to create the ecosystem where the handful of "critical" products could also be made here. To say nothing of federally funded public works projects in energy, transportation, and housing infrastructure that would make the New Deal look small.I'll disagree with you here. America is actually home to a number of light and medium manufacturing shops and has existing infrastructure. Do we need more? Sure. But not nearly on par with the New Deal or whatever it is that Bernie Sanders wants.
